Businessman Responds to Obama’s Re-Election By Reading Prayer, Laying Off Employees
Sad… but you were warned Ohio.
Via the Washington Post:
For the chairman and chief executive of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal company, the reelection of President Obama was no cause for celebration. It was a time for prayer – and layoffs.
Robert E. Murray read a prayer to a group of company staff members on the day after the election, lamenting the direction of the country and asking: “Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.”
On Wednesday, Murray also laid off 54 people at American Coal, one of his subsidiary companies, and 102 at Utah American Energy, blaming a “war on coal” by the administration of President Barack Obama.”
Sadly, there has been a major wave of layoffs in the short time since the President was re-elected to another four years of destroying the economy. We covered several of them that will come at the hands of Obamacare here at FreedomWorks. The Blaze has even more listed.
More specifically in line with this post however, we also warned voters in states that rely heavily on the coal industry prior to the election. Here’s what we wrote:
Obama’s EPA Set to Crush Coal Country
Lurking quietly in the shadows, behind a wall of political rhetoric and campaign season hype, is a post-election surprise that could ring the death knell for the coal industry, killing massive amounts of jobs in states such as Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Reports are beginning to surface that the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to implement a slew of anti-coal regulations after the election, which will result in the elimination of nearly 900,000 jobs annually.
All of this of course has been carefully calculated for political reasons.
…
Do the American people, and even more so, the voters in coal dependent states such as Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, recognize that they deserve more from a President?
Tomorrow will tell.
The next day told alright… and immediately the coal industry in Ohio is feeling the effects. America apparently didn’t want more from a President.
And now real lives, real jobs, and real people are paying the price.
Scandal – Obama Officials Caught Pressuring Contractors to Fudge Job Loss Numbers
Shocking or par for the course?
Via the Washington Free Beacon:
Obama administration officials may have pressured government contractors to change job loss estimates associated with coal regulations, audio recordings reveal.
The tapes show that unnamed officials with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) asked government contractors to change their calculations of job losses associated with the Stream Protection Rule.
A preliminary draft of an environmental impact statement estimated that up to 7,000 coalminers could lose their jobs under the administration’s “preferred” regulation. After a leaked copy of the report went public, officials asked the contractors to compare job estimates to a model in which another regulation was enforced, rather than the real world numbers.
“It’s not the real world, this is rulemaking,” an OSM official tells a skeptical contractor on the recording.
“If we’re to assume [the 2008 rule] is enforced in the coal-producing states, this is a very small [impact],” the contractor replies. “But that, as you said, is not the real world, that’s pretending … I thought we were looking at what’s going to change in Kentucky, what’s going to change in Pennsylvania, what’s going to change in Ohio, what’s going to change in Wyoming.”
When a second OSM official makes light of the “theoretical discussion,” the contractor shoots back that “his [the OSM official’s proposed criteria] was theoretical, mine was practical.”
The agency fired the contractors studying the rule less than one month later.
Not only has the administration been caught red-handed trying to manipulate numbers, they actively tried to cover up the scandal.
The House Natural Resources Committee obtained the tapes from an unidentified third party after OSM provided heavily redacted transcripts—the exchange above, for example, was blacked out—and withheld the audio recordings.
This is an administration that was caught nearly two years ago trying to inflate job numbers by demanding that Department of Energy contractors use a metric called ‘lives touched’ when counting jobs created via the stimulus. As explained by a CH2M Hill spokesman in the summer of 2010:
“Lives Touched” is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds. This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.
This meant that the DOE’s accounting system was not accurately counting jobs, but rather was tracking a cumulative analysis of all individuals who contribute anything to any given project. An overall headcount of sorts. According to reporting instructions for CH2M subcontractors, this constitutes the “total number of workers who have directly charged 1 or more hours of work time to a … contract”
This new report on contractors and the coal industry is just another in a pattern of the Obama administration using smoke and mirrors to convince the American people that the economy isn’t nearly as bad as one would think. This particular case had the added effect of trying to minimize the tangible evidence that Obama was intentionally trying to kill the coal industry – a result that has been definitively proven.
EPA Set to Limit Greenhouse Gases From Power Plants
The biggest result won’t be a stemming of alleged man made global warming, it will be the rise in unemployment in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Via Free Enterprise:
The Environmental Protection Agency is close to issuing the first limits to cut U.S. greenhouse gases from power plants, with an announcement possible as soon as today, according to people familiar with the matter.
The rules from President Barack Obama’s administration would set emissions for all power plants at the level established for a natural-gas plant, or about half what is released from a coal-burning facility. Any new coal plants would need expensive carbon-capture equipment, according to the people, who declined to be identified before an announcement.
The proposed nationwide standards would be the first by the EPA for carbon-dioxide from power plants, the largest source of those emissions in the U.S. Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club are pressing the Obama administration to issue tight standards to head off an increase in global warming that they warn could be catastrophic.“It will make it nearly impossible to build a new coal plant,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an interview. “The market has been moving in this direction already” so the rule “captures the end of an era.”
This comes as no surprise to anybody who paid attention to the President’s intentions prior to his election, in which he promised to bankrupt the coal industry.
Obama, January 2008: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
When Obama talks of having a laser focus on the economy, what he means is having a laser focus on putting ideology above economy.
Earlier this month, Sean Hackbarth reported on the effects that the administration’s extreme environmental agenda is having, with the announcement of more plany closings:
Yesterday, GenOn Energy, the third-largest U.S. independent power producer, announced they were shutting down power plants, because “forecasted returns on investments necessary to comply with environmental regulations are insufficient.” That’s financial-speak for “Regulations make it too costly to keep them running.”
From Bloomberg:
Shutdowns will begin in June at the units, which don’t generate enough profit to cover the costs of complying with the rules, Houston-based GenOn said today in a statement. The plants, located at eight sites in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey, generate 3,140 megawatts in the wholesale market overseen by PJM Interconnection. Except for one unit, all of the plants burn coal, according to GenOn’s website.
Jeff Ostermayer at Shopfloor.org reminds us that “These closings will again result in the loss of jobs and have a negative impact on the local communities. Often we forget about the ripple effect of these regulations and how it can impact a small town and community.”
More Coal Plants Closing Due to EPA Regulations
Obama the Job Creator strikes again.
From Thurber’s Thoughts:
FirstEnergy today announced the closing of six coal-fired plants, including our plant here in Oregon, Ohio, and three others in our state. We already have some of the highest electricity rates in the state. How much will our rates go up without this local plant?
And what about the employees??? More than 500 employees will be out of work, though some may relocate to other plants or take early retirement. And then there are the ancillary jobs and economic benefits that will decrease, including transportation, office and manufacturing suppliers, etc…
So much for a President who said his number one priority was jobs.
The press release gives the specific reason for the plant closings:
The decision to close the plants is based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which were recently finalized, and other environmental regulations.
President Obama is not concerned about jobs or economic growth, he is bound to a rigid green tech ideology. He provided a glimpse of things to come when he said this:
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
The President stated that he would actively work to bankrupt a major job-generating industry in America.
We call that ‘killing jobs’.
To the President it’s ‘mission accomplished’.
Mental Recession 